Islands on the Mainland: Catholic Missions and Spatial Strategies in
Transitional China, 1840-1940

Missionary encounters are always spatialized: specific places are chosen, buildings are erected, and settlements gradually grow. The immense territory of China led to the development of many local encounters between missionaries and Chinese people, which, like little islands, were individually more or less successful. After having explained the territorial organization and the multiplication of the church provinces in China, this lecture examines seven categories of ‘missionary islands’, defined according to both their function and their location: 1. concession territories in the treaty ports, 2. urban cathedral compounds, 3. settlements in towns and villages, 4. newly created Christian villages and fortified communities, 5. cemeteries and memorial places of missionaries’ martyrs, 6. places of pilgrimages, 7. abbeys. These missionary islands included churches, orphanages, priests’ residences, and sometime important complexes with schools, seminaries and hospitals. All these settlements belonged to networks using precise spatial strategies of land ownership, occupation, defense, orientation, building, and visibility in the public space. At the time of the Republic, most of these places grew, some of them becoming modern and rational organized areas, other shifting to pioneering places of Chinese-Christian inculturation.

The workshop will include abundant illustrations on powerpoint.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Coomansis an architecture historian, associate professor from the Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning, University of Leuven where he teaches architectural history, theory and history of heritage conservation. He is a staff member of the Raymond Lemaire International Center for Conservation, University of Leuven, adjunct assistant professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, School of Architecture, and associated researcher at the Canadian Chair for Urban Heritage at UQÀM Montréal. As research fellow or lecturer, he has worked at the University of Leiden, Free University of Brussels (VUB), KADOC – Documentation and Research Centre for Religion, Culture and Society (KU Leuven), and at The Netherlands Institute for the Advanced Studies (NIAS). Prof. Coomans holds a Ph.D. in art history and archaeology from the Université Catholique de Louvain. His research areas include mediaeval religious architecture, Gothic revival churches, reuse of redundant churches, and Christian architecture in China. He has published 10 books and about 85 articles and book chapters in international publications. He is series director of Architectura Medii Aevi at Brepols Publishers, and is a founder of “Future for Religious Heritage: the European network for places of worship” (http://www.futurereligiousheritage.eu/). He is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium, the Royal Commission for Monuments and Sites of Brussels.